Just Call Me Superhero (2 page)

“I only took that medicine for a week—and only because they said it would help with the pain. And that was a year ago!” I raised my voice a bit more. Didn’t want the client to have to strain to overhear us.

“Oh, right. Well, then, let Marietta make you a coffee and then go home.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“Why did you lie to me, why did you lie to me! Why do you always say that?”

“Tell me why.”

“Would you have gone otherwise?”

By this point I’d allowed myself to be shuffled into the screened-off waiting area, where there was a coffee table with little sparkling bottles of mineral water and orderly stacks of magazines about outdoor living. I slumped down into one of the chairs next to a box of toy blocks. The chair gave a feeble groan.

“I’m not going to go back, just so you know.”

“Fine. Just rot away at home.”

She yanked painfully on my one undamaged ear and then disappeared again behind the frosted glass. The door clanged noisily shut and vibrated, causing the adjacent doors to vibrate as well. Claudia’s apology echoed in the hallway.

With an understanding smile, Marietta offered me a cup of coffee. I sloshed about half of it onto my pants. I still couldn’t smile properly—my lips hurt and the skin strained across my entire cheek as if it had been stitched together too tightly.

*

In the car she held the hand with the cigarette out the window and flicked the ash in the wind. The wind blew it back onto her arm and it clung there looking like dandruff. I was waiting for her to pepper me with questions about the cripple support group. And for her to pretend to be interested in the disabilities of the others and then to say that I should count myself lucky because I could walk, see, and hear, that the world offered so much more opportunity for me. She hadn’t gone through that routine in a long time.

“Claudia,” I said. She looked over at me, surprised at my tone. “If you were a girl, would you run away from me screaming?”

“I
am
a girl.” She turned the radio off and put a CD into the slot in the dashboard.

“That’s why I asked.”

“You know the old fairy tale.” It must have been one of her yoga CDs. The car filled with a strange kind of groaning sound. Claudia turned down the volume until it was just a quiet hum.

“What fairy tale?”

“Beauty and the Beast.”

I bit down on my lower lip until it tasted salty and still I couldn’t feel a thing. There was a time when Claudia kept saying that I didn’t look bad at all, that I was almost as good looking as before, that I didn’t need to hide myself. That my problem was only in my head. That I had just
convinced
myself that I was deformed. “Look at yourself in the mirror—you’re not ugly at all,” she’d said time and time again, trying to hold my head still when I turned away from my reflection. “Life is not over because of a few scars, Marek.” She said it so often that I began to think I might actually believe her if she repeated it another ten times. Or fifteen. Or a hundred.

And now she was saying Beauty and the Beast. I looked silently out the window. Outside it was nighttime. I had waited in that screened-off corner, bent over a hunting magazine, until it got dark. Marietta had long since gone home and Claudia nearly locked me in the office. She had gasped and grabbed her chest when I called to her from my spot behind the room divider.

“At least take off the damn sunglasses.” She tossed the cigarette away and then pushed the button to close the power window. “You don’t want to ruin your eyes on top of everything else.”

T
he following Thursday I was surprised to see that they were all there again. Except Marlon and the guru, neither of whom I missed. Janne was accompanied by the same woman, the one who looked like an older version of her. With legs. She pushed Janne’s wheelchair down the long hallway and the old tiles of the Family Services Center squeaked beneath the wheels.

“Hi, Janne,” I said as I caught up to them.

“Hi, Mark.” She looked up at me briefly and then stared straight ahead. Her mother squinted nervously.

“I can push the wheelchair,” I said.

“That’s very nice of you.” Janne’s mother tightened her grip on the handles as if she was afraid I wanted to make off with her daughter.

“Piss off,” said Janne without turning her head.

I shrugged my shoulders and let them go ahead.

The self-described psycho queen had brought an embroidered pillow that she was sitting on now. I remembered her name: Kevin. Her lipstick reminded me of Claudia’s though she had on more and had applied it much more deftly. Friedrich smiled when he saw me, which made me reflexively reach up and touch my own face. But it was still the same. Richard with the prosthetic had both legs, the real one and the artificial one, up on the chair next to him and was staring blankly out the window.

I entered the room behind Janne. She was met by a flurry of greetings. For me, nothing. So I didn’t bother to say hello either.

“Bye, Mama,” said Janne glumly to the woman, who looked around nervously, scanning from one face to the next and fidgeting with her handbag. Janne rolled her wheelchair to the edge of the circle the others had formed with their chairs. There was a space left free for her and an empty chair next to the space. I headed for the empty chair but was stopped in my tracks by a look from Janne.
Not you
, said the look, and I pivoted and headed in another direction as if I’d run into a glass wall. But nobody seemed to find it funny.

Without looking at me Richard lifted his limbs off the chair next to him, freeing up another spot. He looked totally annoyed having to do it, as if I’d begged to sit next to him.

The guru was late. We sat there silently. Janne stared at the wall and looked as if she had turned to stone. Richard read the newspaper. Kevin and Friedrich looked anxiously around the circle trying to make eye contact.

The door flew open. Everyone except Richard looked up.

But it was only Marlon, who I had already put out of my mind.

Now it was easier for me to believe he was blind. He stood in the doorway and rocked on the balls of his feet. He was frowning and his nostrils quivered. I wondered what his eyes looked like behind his sunglasses. Whether maybe he had something to hide. Or maybe someone just told him he’d look cool with sunglasses on, like Agent K from
Men in Black
. Like, a girlfriend or something. He looked like somebody who had sex on a regular basis.

“This chair is free,” said Janne quietly. He turned his head in her direction. He went toward with tentative steps, tripped on her wheelchair, and nearly lost his balance. She reached out her hand to brace him but then he managed to straighten up again. I’d bet anything he did it on purpose. Then he grabbed the free chair and let himself fall into it. He stretched out his hand toward Janne as he did but wasn’t able to reach her. This time she did not put out her hand.

I wondered whether Marlon realized that everyone was looking at him. Blind people apparently sense that sort of thing. Janne definitely knew that she got stared at, stared at like we were some poor working-class family and she was our TV. But it didn’t seem to bother her. Maybe she even liked it.

“Is everyone here?” Marlon asked Janne. She shrugged her shoulders and looked around the circle.

“The guru’s not here,” said Richard. “He probably needs a new Chinese teacher’s handbook.”

“Why Chinese?” asked Friedrich.

“Because what I actually registered for was Intensive Chinese.” Richard looked wistfully out the window.

“I don’t believe this is that sort of course,” said Friedrich, sounding unsure.

“Do you think I really do?” Richard rolled up the newspaper and swung it at the wall. Kevin jumped. Something small and black fell to the floor. If I hadn’t have heard the crack of the shell I would have taken it for a housefly.

“And you, Janne?” asked Friedrich. “Why are you here?”

She ignored the question. She didn’t even look at him.

We heard someone running down the hall. Then the guru was standing in the doorway gasping for air.

“Couldn’t find a parking space?” asked Kevin quizzically.

The guru held his chest, wheezing, and leaned against the doorframe. He didn’t look just tired but also surprised.

“You’re all here.”

“Where are the drums?” Kevin asked weakly.

Friedrich was the only one who had signed up to, as he put it, make contact with other handicapped people. The guru seesawed back and forth on the back legs of his chair and listened. As he spoke Friedrich let his little blue eyes rest on me of all people. I crossed my legs, took off my hat and put it on my knee, and smoothed out my hair. Not only had my hair not been cut for an eternity, it hadn’t been combed in nearly as long. My fingers kept getting snarled in the matted strands. As Friedrich began to explain that his organs were decomposing because of an autoimmune disease and that as a result he didn’t have long to live, I felt sick.

Friedrich happily listed all the medications he took on a daily basis. They had complicated poetic names that he seemed to take visible delight in pronouncing.

“Stop,” said Janne when he started to say the fourth one. “Nobody cares.”

Friedrich gulped. He forgot to close his mouth and gummed the warm air for a while.

“But we’re here to talk.”

“Not with you,” said Marlon.

Kevin started to tremble again.

The guru cleared his throat and turned suddenly to me.

“Tell me, Mark.”

“Marek.”

“Tell me, Marek. There was a story in the newspaper a year ago about a fighting dog that attacked a young man.”

“Really?” I said. For the first time Janne looked at me for longer than a quarter of a second. For another quarter second I’d probably have to have allowed my entire ear to get bitten off.

“Yes?” I said in her direction.

“Well, I was just wondering . . . ” said the guru. Everyone seemed to be listening, his voice hung in the breathless silence, and my back began to tingle. I didn’t want them all to stare at me. Everyone always did anyway, but somehow here it didn’t seem right. Blind Marlon had even turned his left ear to me and seemed to be straining to listen.“ . . . if perhaps you would like to tell us about it,” said the guru.

I hadn’t been expecting such brazenness.

“I remember it, too,” said Richard. “It was big news in the paper and they ran a photo of him.”

“What kind of photo—before or after?” asked Marlon.

I needed to do something to distract myself from my urge to rip the chair out from under him. So I stood up and left the room and I didn’t even care whether Janne looked at me for more than a second as I walked out.

I crossed the street, past all the lit-up shops and bars, and my eyes burned. It happened all the time and it was annoying. I wiped my eyes with a finger without removing my sunglasses but the burning didn’t stop. What I really needed was to take off the glasses and dry my face with a tissue, but there were people all around. A class of babbling and giggling elementary school kids passed me. Most of them only came up to my belly button.

They didn’t look at me because I was outside their field of vision and thus outside their world, but I could still sense it.

Whenever I went anywhere people altered their course to avoid me. The more crowded a place was the easier it was to recognize. Where once there had been chaos, suddenly organized lanes appeared, all seemingly regulated by the same cosmic diagram that had as its goal to get people past me unharmed and with as much clearance as possible. I felt like a clove of garlic in the middle of a stream of ants. People probably didn’t even realize they were doing it—their subconscious altered their course in a way that soothed their mind without their ever recognizing what had caused the agitation or what hazard they had sidestepped.

I changed course as well. I went into the first ice cream shop I saw. I’d never particularly cared for ice cream but the bathroom was right at the front of the shop. I slipped in and locked the door. I turned off the light and took off my sunglasses. I felt around for the sink. I thought about Marlon and his question:
Before or after?

I braced myself on the sink and tears fell on my hands. Crying was ridiculous but when my eyes itched and burned like this there was no stopping the tears. I felt for the faucet, turned it on, and splashed cold water on my face. Somebody knocked on the door.

“Just a second,” I shouted and let myself slump onto the toilet seat cover.

One eye itched worse than the other. They probably screwed up and stitched one of the tear ducts closed. Claudia cried a lot at first, always when she thought I wouldn’t pick up on it. But of course I picked up on everything. She walked around with a splotchy, puffy face, her eyes squinting, irregular spots of cover cream smeared on, and thought nobody would notice.

And then suddenly she was happy again. Just like that, though I didn’t notice exactly when it happened. Like a switch had been thrown. She got used to everything much faster than I expected. She could look me in the face without batting an eye. At first she touched the scars with her fingertips a lot and asked whether it hurt and assured me that I wasn’t ugly. She didn’t do that anymore.

The bathroom door shook as a fist banged on it.

I stood up, put my sunglasses on, and threw open the door. I saw a young waiter wearing a vest, bow tie, and pants all in black. His mouth opened in a silent scream but something about the shape of his mouth was off. Lip and tongue impairment, I thought to myself. Must have had to go to a speech therapist as a kid. Probably still slurs his speech.

“Boo!” I said and went past him and back out of the shop.

T
he next morning I discovered that somebody had taken my
Pschyrembel Clinical Dictionary
.

It was my only copy; I’d bought it a half-year earlier at a shop that specialized in medical books. It sat on my bookshelf alongside an atlas of human anatomy, an early-twentieth century book on gynecology and obstetrics passed down to me by my grandfather, and another historical but utterly useless tome with the romantic title
The Art of Healing
, that I’d spared from the recycling bin only because of its beautiful jacket. Claudia had given it to me for my birthday two months before in the hope that my interest in medical reference books might lead to something good and improve our chances of successfully living together.